“A joyful, serious, and skilful showcase of international animators“
Manipulate Festival takes to the Edinburgh Filmhouse for the very first time at tonight’s screening of eight animated documentary shorts. Animation and documentary don’t immediately overlap in any mental Venn diagrams; lazy assumptions take animation to be whimsical and creative, documentary always serious and formulaic.
But ahead of the screening, Artistic Director and CEO Dawn Taylor explains to the audience why these art forms are so integral to one another: animation allows for the representation of things too unsafe or even impossible to film. It can recreate moments otherwise lost to memory, it can take the viewer into places never thought possible, and – above all, really – it can make the complex and overwhelming accessible and understandable.
The eight films curated for tonight’s showcase are all highly varied in tone and content: we begin with ‘My Dead Dad’s Porno Tapes’ which is about, well, director Charlie Tyrell’s dead dad’s porno tapes. But not really: it’s about grief and taboo and intergenerational trauma and reticence and anger. It is exceptionally moving and exceptionally funny – as will emerge as a theme of tonight’s documentaries, it takes the insurmountable (death and everything in its wake) and focuses on the seemingly irrelevant mundane (a 2008 Radiohead concert, Hot n Horny Harlots on VHS).
It’s also true of the screening’s most overtly political films, such as ‘Our Uniform’ (a beautiful and textured exploration of being a girl in Iran – but mostly their school uniforms) and ‘I Died in Irpin’ (the horrendous story of fleeing Ukraine from Russian bombs – but mostly about regretting your ex-boyfriend). There’s something almost deceptively soothing about the animated mode; it’s misleadingly easy to watch, distractingly gorgeous to look at. It draws you in and sucks up your attention, until you’re left astounded by the weightiness of what you’ve just learned – educational entertainment, at its very best.
Animals and their tendency to get tied up in culture are another theme. ‘Percebes’ follows the journey of shellfish in Portugal’s Algarve, which seemingly has the same tourism complex as Edinburgh: they need them, they hate them (‘We can’t enjoy when the city is alive, because we’re working’, says a fishmonger). ‘Veni Vidi Non Vici’ is another Portuguese offering, focussing on the tradition of bullfighting and the tricky ethics of balancing tradition with modern morality. ‘The Harbourmaster’ is perhaps the emotionally lightest of the night, animating the life and forcible death of a chain-smoking, troublemaking Norwegian swan – like a Scandi Bojack Horseman.
The most affecting film of the lot is indisputably ‘Inside, the Valley Sings’ (Natasza Cetner and Nathan Fagan), an almost unbearably vivid insight into the interior lives of American prisoners held in solitary confinement. Banging their heads against the wall, directing movies on a brick wall, fantasising of their children’s voices. It is a gut punch and it is a masterful piece of animation; the hand drawn faces of the incarcerated contrasted become imprinted in your mind. One particularly powerful moment comes from Frank de Palma, a man who spent 22 years in solitary confinement. There were no mirrors in his cell, and he tells of seeing his 58 year old face for the first time since he was in his 30s, ‘I cried – I had gotten old.’
Manipulate Festival’s Animated Documentary Shorts screening was a wonderful display of international talent, highlighting the very best of how animation can educate, move, and firmly press itself into the deepest corners of an audiences’ brain (much like fingers in stop motion clay).
This screening was a one-time event shown at the Edinburgh Filmhouse on the 7th of February as part of the Manipulate Festival which is running in venues across Scotland from the 4th to the 10th of February.